Saturday, 14 March 2015

Robocopy can be tricky to use even at the best of times. Use the /MT switch to multi-thread, it's the only way you can.

You can see if it is working properly by looking at the open file handles via the MMC Shares snap-in. Hold down F5 to refresh continuously and you'll see multiple files being opened simultaneously by robocopy.

With EPO you may sometimes find a repository has failed to replicate. Upon looking in the server task log, it will say:

"Failed to upload file SiteStat.xml" "error code" "access denied"

even though nothing actually changed!

You have a few options now.

First, try doing a "Replicate Now". It might work.

If it doesn't, then try recreating the repository altogether. Delete the folder it is stored in and then recreate it and reshare it once again. Then do a full repository replication (as opposed to incremental).

If that still doesn't work, try giving the epo service account full control on the folder.

None of this should be necessary, really, but that's EPO for you. Sometimes it does strange things!

I am used to killing local processes via the command line using the taskkill command. There's a few ways to use it but my favored is to use the name of the process because often there are multiple instances and if you run this command repeatedly within a few seconds, you will kill them all:

taskkill /f /im nameoftheprocess.exe

If you want to do that remotely then you need the /s switch

e.g.

taskkill /s remoteservername /f /im msiexec.exe

In the above example, I'm killing the Windows installer process on a remote server.

With the Dell KACE K1000 appliance, you can force an inventory very easily from the web console.

But you may have a reason to just want to do it instead from the client itself. I do this when I'm creating Managed Installations. If I install or re-install a program it can be a pain to go back to the web console and dive through the menus to the device and then force an inventory.

With a vlookup command in Excel, you often get "N/A"s if nothing is found. These can look quite ugly.

If you want to replace them with something, you can of course copy and paste the text so that the formulas are no more. Then do a find and replace. But that means the formulas are gone and the spreadsheet is no longer dynamic i.e. it won't change as the data changes.

Sometimes with McAfee VirusScan you find a client that simply refuses to update. Via the EPO console you can run a client task, update task. But often, this won't work either.

Luckily there is a way to manually update from the client itself. I will say, however, this is usually just a temporary fix. But at least you can get the client up to date there and then and fix the bigger problem later (maybe a firewall issue or even requires a reinstall of the program or even a rebuild of the OS in rare instances).

You basically stop the McAfee services on the client then go to the McAfee support portal and download the zip file for the latest DAT and extract it to "C:\Program Files\Common Files\McAfee\Engine" then restart the services.

This is when you have both a primary and a backup DHCP server or maybe you just have two DHCP servers with equal roles.

In our case we had primary on the main site and backup server in another country. Something happened to the primary server but it was fixed. But the clients kept connecting to the backup one.

The way it worked normally was that clients should seek from the DHCP server that gives the quickest response i.e. the nearest one. So why wasn't it working now?

Simple, because once clients have a lease, they always try to go back to the DHCP server where they got their most recent lease to try to obtain a new one.

The solution was to deactivate the scope of the backup DHCP server for the length of the lease time (I forget what the default is in Windows but I think it's 8 days). As a result, the clients couldn't obtain a new lease and looked for a new DHCP server and reverted back the the primary one (which also happens to be the nearest). After about a week, I reactivated the scope on the backup DHCP server.

If you use a KMS server at work (it's basically a dedicated Microsoft licensing server on your premises, and is the opposite of using a volume license MAK key that activates over the internet) then you if you find your Windows is not activating then you may need to enter a KMS client setup key.

The word "Files" might not be there, instead you might get a confirmation page instead. Just make sure you are shrinking the log files and not the database itself. Sometimes you have to click a drop-down.

It will basically reclaim empty space and you can free up quite a lot this way.

This is a good video that helped me when I forgot and needed to remember again in a jam!